As of 15 May 2026, the 300 companies applinity tracks have 44,727 open US roles between them. Apple, Amazon, and Google are the three largest hirers; defense and space — SpaceX and Anduril — both crack the top five. 87% of postings disclose a compensation range, and the median ceiling sits at $210,000. Below is the full read: who is hiring hardest, where the roles are, what they are, and what they pay.
The headline numbers
Two structural facts stand out. First, comp transparency is now the norm, not the exception — 39,003 of the 44,727 open roles state a salary range up front, a side effect of pay-transparency law spreading across California, New York, Washington, and Colorado. Second, just over a quarter of roles are remote-eligible; the rest are anchored to an office, and the geography below shows where.
Who is hiring hardest
Ranked by open US roles on applinity. The list is a useful reminder that "Silicon Valley tech" is a loose label: alongside the hyperscalers and the chip companies, the biggest hirers include space and defense (SpaceX, Anduril) and a deep bench of life-sciences names (Takeda, Thermo Fisher, Abbott, AbbVie, Johnson & Johnson) staffing engineering and data roles just as aggressively.
Apple alone accounts for roughly one open role in twelve across the whole catalog.
Where the roles are
Counts below are postings whose location string mentions the metro, so a role tagged with multiple offices is counted in each. The pattern is clear: San Francisco still leads, but New York is a close second — the large SV employers all run substantial NYC engineering benches — and the Seattle corridor outweighs any single South Bay city.
Which roles dominate
Bucketed by job title. Software engineering is, predictably, the single largest family — but the spread underneath it is the interesting part: there are more open hardware-engineering roles (firmware, silicon, ASIC, FPGA) than dedicated data roles, a direct consequence of how much of the catalog is chip and hardware companies.
What the roles pay
Across the 39,003 postings that disclose a range, here is the distribution of the top of the band:
Half of all disclosed roles top out at $210,000 or more in base — before equity, which at the larger companies is frequently the bigger half of the package. A quarter clear $270,000. These are ceilings, not offers: the figure a candidate lands depends on level, location, and negotiation.
How to read this
Every number here is a snapshot of applinity's catalog on 15 May 2026 — 300 hand-picked companies, US open roles only, each pulled directly from the company's applicant tracking system rather than a re-scraped aggregator index. The catalog refreshes nightly, so the live totals on the jobs index and the company pages will have moved since publication. We'll re-run this report monthly.